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How do I delete someone from my Hotmail address book?

Question:

How do I remove names from the address book? I’m using Windows Live Hotmail and Windows 7.

Actually, it’s not hard at all once you get around a small terminology barrier.

The problem is that what you and I might call an address book, Hotmail calls your contacts.

Let me show you how to get at that and how to remove an entry.

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Address book? Contacts!

Start at your Windows Live Hotmail inbox.

You can find your address book, which Hotmail calls “Contacts”, by clicking on the Contacts link near the bottom of the window:

Windows Live Hotmail Contacts link

That’ll take you to your Windows Live Contacts, available to all of the Windows Live services that you might use:

Windows Live Contacts

As you can see in this example, I have only one contact.

To delete a contact, simply check the checkbox next to the contact that you wish to delete, and click Delete:

Deleting a Windows Live Contact

Windows Live will prompt you to confirm that you really want to delete this contact:

Windows Live Contacts confirmation dialog

Click OK and the contact will be removed from the list.

Next Steps

Are you backing up your Hotmail? I hear from people all the time who’ve lost their accounts. Even if they get the account back, they find that everything in it – including those contacts – have been deleted. Have a look at How do I backup Windows Live Hotmail?

And, of course, I do hope that you’re using your free Hotmail account properly and safely.

Video


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Transcript

Hi everyone, I’m Leo Notenboom for AskLeo.net.

Today I’m going to show you to remove someone from your address book in Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail to be exact.

Now the trick is that Windows Live Hotmail doesn’t have an address book. What they have instead they call ‘contacts’ so down in the lower left-hand side you’d click on the Contacts list to go to your Contacts list.

Now you can see I only have one entry in my Contacts list here.

To delete it, all you would do is select that contact with the checklist and click ‘delete’. After confirming with Hotmail that yes, indeed you do want to get rid of them, the contact disappears.

And that’s it!

The biggest thing to remember here is that very simply that what some people call an address book, other people like Windows Live Hotmail, call your ‘contacts list’.

I’m Leo Notenboom for AskLeo.net.

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